Re: [PATCH] namei: revert old behaviour for filename_lookup with LOOKUP_PARENT flag

[Al Viro]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 01:09:04PM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 07:58:51PM +0000, Vineeth Remanan Pillai wrote:
> > filename_lookup used to return success for non-existing file when called
> > with LOOKUP_PARENT flag. This behaviour was changed with
> > commit 8bcb77fabd7c ("namei: split off filename_lookupat()
> > with LOOKUP_PARENT")
> > 
> > The above patch split parent lookup functionality to a different function
> > filename_parentat and changed all calls to filename_lookup(LOOKUP_PARENT)
> > to the new function filename_parentat. But functions like kern_path which
> > passed the flags directly to filename_lookup regressed due to this.
> > 
> > This patch aims to fix the regressed behaviour by calling
> > filename_parentat from filename_lookup if the flags contain LOOKUP_PARENT.
> 
> What callers shows te problems?  That's probaby were the fix need to got
> in, and even if not that's still part of a good bug report.

Out-of-tree, at a guess...  Incidentally, since filename_lookup() is not
exported, it's probably kern_path() that gets used wherever it is.
Depending on the details of what's being attempted,  kern_path_locked()
might or might not be the right primitive to use, but I would probably
start with checking if that's what the code in question really wants.

Use:
	// kernel_string is an kernel pointer to NUL-terminated array of char

	struct path path;
	struct dentry *dentry;

	dentry = kern_path_locked(kernel_string, &path);
	if (IS_ERR(dentry))
		// failed while getting the parent, or not a regular last
		// component (/, ., .., <something>/., <something>/..)
		sod off // no cleanup needed

	// now path contains the resolved parent and dentry points to the
	// dentry of child, possibly negative; the last component of the
	// name can be determined from dentry->d_name.  Parent directory
	// is locked, making sure that directory entry won't be changed
	// until you are done.

	if (d_is_really_negative(dentry)) {
		// parent exists, but child doesn't
	} else {
		// child exists
	}

	// clean up: drop dentry, unlock parent, drop dentry/vfsmount of parent
	dput(dentry);
	inode_unlock(path.dentry->d_inode);
	path_put(&path);